Keith Olbermann revisits the Conservatives and Colbert study

A couple of days ago, Stephen Colbert made Keith Olbermann’s list of World’s Best Persons. This latest clip has Keith Olbermann speaking with one of the lead authors of the report from Ohio State University, Heather LaMarre, a political entertainment scholar at the university. They discuss the concept behind the study of biases message processing, or in other words, hearing what you want to hear. They mention that the study participants viewed the Amy Goodman interview to discover the individual biases. LaMarre also mentions that another study about to be published will be discussing the affects on political attitudes from watching ‘The Colbert Report’.

Comments

  1. Caitlin says:

    It’s fascinating, alright… how this study has found a material more dense than diamonds: people’s brains!

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  2. Anonymous Coward says:

    The study designers must have looked long and hard for a show segment without any obvious jokes. The Amy Goodman interview is not particularly funny and in this interview “Stephen” is particularly obnoxious and doesn’t say anything self-evidently ridiculous. If you don’t know anything about Colbert Report, I could see how you could get taken in. If they selected most other show segments, they would be too ridiculous and full of one-liners for anyone to mistake the satire.

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    • wren says:

      I don’t know, it’s a pretty powerful effect. Stephen himself has said that some of his more conservative friends from South Carolina tell him that they like what he’s saying on air now, versus when he was on that liberal Daily Show.

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  3. Nukaleu says:

    This was great to see on Olbermann last night. It really makes me wonder how I would see him if I didn’t know much about him and leaned to the right.

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  4. MaryLovesColbert says:

    This is great, thanks for posting it! I still don’t understand how you could think he’s meaning what he says up there. Crazy…

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  5. GabbyD says:

    as a scientist myself, what i’d like to know is whether the conservatives knew about the “I play an idiot” line that colbert explains to every guest.

    just coz you know about TCR, doesn’t mean you’d know about the underlying premise/the ‘i play an idiot’ line.

    i know, coz while i’ve been a TCR fan since the start, i only started poking into the shows philosophy (and discovered this website) in 2006.

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